Mar 24 2009
Clannad After Story 22 - Parallel..
Ah, Clannad 22. The inevitable ending. Would it be tragic, angsty, “Town Hates Tomoya” ending? Or would it be happy and fluffy, the consistency of spun candy? Personally, even without knowing the background from the game (which blkmage describes wonderfully)
Nonetheless, I was pleasantly-surprised by how they’d finally linked up the girl in the world as well as the robot. So the girl’s Ushio…and the robot’s Tomoya, and his alternate ending is because when Ushio ‘died’, he got a second chance to go back and amass good deeds to build a better life. Resulting in a Good End instead of a Bad End — with a beautiful family of three: Tomoya, Nagisa, and Ushio.
Not everyone gets a second chance all the time, and it’s a nice fantasy to have. Like Blkmage says, though, it’s not really adequately-explained in the anime — I’ve read a few reviews where people expressed puzzlement over the seemingly hackjob cliched ending. To the the truth, I’m a sucker for happy endings too, but I have to admit this one kinda whacked me over the head as well.
I would have imagined the ending to be a little different, though…that Ushio, like the girl who stays in the ice word, sacrifices herself so Tomoya can have a second chance. Tomoya and Nagisa still have a kid, but it wouldn’t be Ushio. Hrm. Either that, or Tomoya had fallen into a lucid dream after Ushio’s death, much like in Vanilla Sky — which is why, upon their ‘remeeting’, Nagisa says she’d been afraid he might have thought meeting her was a bad thing.
How did you like Clannad’s ending? :)
